Fast Food Tycoon - Postmortem

As the lead for Fast Food Tycoon, I have many things to say about the development of the game. I myself am not particularly good at any part of the development process, so the lead role is the only one I can do. Besides, I think it would be nice to have a producer role in the future, so I’d like to take this opportunity whenever I can. For the most part, I acted as a 2D Artist, handling the sprites and UI. Learning how to publish to Google Play correctly was kind of a pain, so it’s good that someone like me took the responsibility for that.

App Icon for Fast Food Tycoon
Feature Graphic for Fast Food Tycoon

        The first thing that I’d like to point out on what went right was that my teammates were, for the most part, doing their work! I remember how in 370, people would wait until the end of the sprint to shove cards in, but in this class, my teammates were disciplined and I never really needed to prod them or anything. I think their work ethic was pretty neat. It really does help to break everything up into one point cards. If anything, it’d be me that needs to step up their game.

Another thing that went well was that asset production was pretty quick. Our modelers made some neat looking appliances and counters, and that allowed us to make our scene look a lot more like a game. As a 2D artist, making sprites and UI went smoothly for me. I was able to rush out some work, which I find really surprising for myself. Usually, I’d be worrying about how good something looks (I still do), but at the end of the day, it just needs to be done.


There were a few things that went wrong. As the game is a simulation game, there’s not exactly any level design to do. It would essentially just be asset production and programming. I thought that this would make it easier on us since we would be able to add in a ton of features into the game. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a double edged sword. After asset production was finished, we mainly had coding tasks left to do. But most of us are not seasoned programmers, so we’d majorly slow down in the work we get done. Our main programmer was really confident that he could take on the bulk of the tasks, even though it was definitely impossible. I decided to have another teammate get the customers to work while our main programmer finished up on getting the workstation minigames running. I had thought she would have been able to get it done within a sprint or two, but it took all the way till the end of the cycle to get it done 100%. As a lead, I had overestimated her abilities. I really should have prodded her more to ask our main programmer for help.

The main thing I was thinking of doing differently would just be to take on more programming tasks. I was worried about programming main features because I was incredibly unsure of my programming skills. My coding skills are still at a beginner level, so I was not very confident that I would be able to do it right. Usually what I worry about the most is when I ask for help and I end up understanding so little that they just end up doing it for me. I should’ve taken on the task of programming the customers. I’ve worked with the main programmer in 370, so he is relatively familiar with my coding knowledge.

I could have also prioritized our programming tasks related to the core gameplay loop much sooner. I was still thinking that our main programmer could have knocked out finishing the workstation minigames before working on the customers. But then the modelers were finished with their part, so I needed to give them something to do.

Something else I should have done is to facilitate communication more between the team members. I needed to be much more involved. To be honest, I would say that the only reason I had a relatively stress free time being a lead was because my teammates were quite self disciplined. So, I felt like I didn’t need to do too much in the way of nagging them. However, sometimes they end up not getting things done on time, and I really don’t like to make people mad. I attempted to prod one of the teammates to ask our main programmers for help, but then that seemed to not really happen until the very last minute. The main thing I learned here is to be more assertive, which I know for sure I have problems with.


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